


don't you lift him, let him drown alive

by talionprinciple (Triskai)



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 04:24:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12313674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskai/pseuds/talionprinciple
Summary: “I should kill you,” Kaz says that night. “It’d be a mercy.”





	don't you lift him, let him drown alive

“I should kill you,” Kaz says that night. “It’d be a mercy.”

They’re on the medical platform, in front of a door with a blue light that makes Venom glaze over and touch his forehead and they had been talking about—who fucking cares what they were talking about. Personnel reports. Supplies. The budget, growing steadily more bloated and unbalanced with a beer-belly of lethal, experimental weaponry _he_ requested they develop. The moon is half-visible behind some gauzy clouds and Kaz has his sunglasses off just so he can see Venom’s reaction.

The phantom doesn’t speak. Just twitches his metal fingers in a jerky, aborted motion and tilts his head towards Kaz. The weak moonlight glints off the shrapnel in his forehead and Kaz puts his sunglasses back on.

“Nothing to say, huh?” The silence grows between them. Kaz measures it out between his hands like rope. “Do you even want to live?”

Silence. Venom is a dark mass against the blue light, misshapen and horned. Kaz thinks, then, that he really is talking to a ghost – like the pain in his missing arm and leg, the man before him is just his brain’s confused fumbling for a part of itself it can’t find. He feels cold. The world looks plasticky and fake and he needs to know that this is real, that Snake is real, and before he knows it he’s lunging forward, snatching the knife from the phantom’s hip and _that_ finally gets a reaction out of it, low and soft, “Kaz—”

“I could do it,” and his voice is shaking, the crutch is digging into his armpit and that knife is against Venom’s throat. The man has his arms at his sides and does _nothing_. There’s a dozen ways Snake could disarm him right now, kill him, knock him out, a one-armed fucking cripple – but Kaz has a knife to his throat. “I could kill you right now. Throw you back into the ocean they pulled you out of. Throw myself in after, maybe, and save Ocelot the trouble.”

The light makes the phantom look sallow and ashen. Like a corpse. Isn’t that what he is? The body of a dead man they’d fished out of the Caribbean and set upon a stage to dance and sing.

“Kaz.” The phantom is looking at his face but Kaz won’t meet his eyes. “It’s not my time to die. Not yours, either.”

The metal hand comes up and settles on the inside of Kaz’s elbow. Pushes. There’s no real force behind it and for a brief, electrifying moment Kaz thinks he’s going to do it, he’s going to push back and the metal will sink into that throat and—

The knife lowers. Venom takes it from his unresisting fingers and puts it back on his belt.

“I don’t want to live. I don’t _want._ ” Venom’s voice is soft and even. He could be reading off a budget report. Kaz thinks of mission debriefings, him and Venom dressed down and passing the wormwood cigar back and forth as they retrace his steps on a map. That tone, used here, about this, makes Kaz sick. “But I’m loyal to my mission. I’m loyal to Diamond Dogs.”

The sick feeling settles in his lungs and burns. “You mean you’re loyal to _him._ ”

Steadily: “Yes.”

This rage, at least, is familiar. It’s what kept him going for those nine long years, and it will keep him going now. He doesn’t need anything else. Kaz draws himself up, sets his jaw, grips his crutch too tight.

“The two of you,” he hisses, seething, “can go to fucking hell.”

Then he walks off, banging his crutch as loud as he can against the grating as he goes. The phantom doesn’t follow. Later, when Kaz thinks back to that night, he pictures the phantom standing there all night smoking with that empty stare. _I don’t want._ A doll, a mannequin, a hollowed out thing filled with wormwood smoke.

That’s the night Kaz decides to leave.


End file.
